PROFESORADO PRIMER CURSO:

I have chosen narrative inquiry as the methodology of choice for my dissertation. because the various methods available, including interviews, surveys, dialogue between

participant and researcher, storytelling, and interpretation of story give me the necessary tools for the in-depth exploration of the questions and the encouragement of self-expression from

individuals I will interview. The individuals who are living the life and sharing the experiences through story provide an opportunity for the researcher-practitioner, in concert with the

participant/story teller, to identify and recognize a community of reformed offenders who give voice to personal transitions from criminal behavior and remain apart from recidivists by sustaining desistance from crime.

Voice is meaning that resides in the individual and enables that individual to participate in a community. The struggle for voice begins when a person attempts to communicate meaning to someone else. Finding the words, speaking for oneself, and feeling heard by others are all a part of this process. Voice suggests relationships: the individual’s relationship to the meaning of

her/his experience and, hence, to language, and the individual’s relationship to the other, since understanding is a social process (Britzman as cited in Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, p. 4).

To delve into the research question of what causes the personal transition from criminal behavior to desistance for African American men who have experienced multiple incarcerations, I encouraged the ex-felon to open his heart and soul and dig to the bottom of his being to answer the question for me—and very likely for himself, as well.

In qualitative research the nature of “voice”, what it represents, who it represents, and who has the power to assert it remains a topic of rigorous intellectual exchange. The ability to provide multiple opportunities for “voice” in privileged settings, without marginalizing a group or an individual, is a concern of qualitative researchers from various genres of research. Qualitative researchers use the tools of interviews, surveys, field observations, shadowing, and archival data in their efforts to uncover the

complexities of voice that provide answers and sometimes questions for their research. (Chapman, 2005, p. 27)

In this study I interviewed the participant, recorded his words, engaged, listened, held the silence between the words, observed, heard the voice, and overlaid the body language (Bruner, 2002). Was that genuine? Is he relaxed and comfortable? Does he trust me (Seidman, 2006)? The interpretation of the stories was as critical as the story being told. And, it was critical that hermeneutic review, in the opinion of the participants, was a true reflection of their lived experiences.

To be successful in the narrative inquiry process, it was necessary to be a participant, as well—listening to the story teller, interacting, and interpreting, developing my voice as

researcher to retell the story. Bruner writes that “to narrate” derives from both “telling” (narrare) and “knowing in some particular way” (gnarus)—the two tangles beyond sorting” (Bruner, 2002, p. 27).

Overview and Definition of Narrative Inquiry

Narrative is phenomenon and method (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). Narrative is story—individuals putting into words the thoughts and feeling of their life experiences and the researcher/writer linking the divide between the stories told and interpretation of meaning. There has been an increasing interest in narrative over the past 20 years, particularly in fields of study that embrace the importance of incorporating the thoughts and feelings of persons with whom the research is conducted. It is no longer acceptable to observe from a disconnected place while sitting in the midst of people observing and calculating, sketching and numbering, making notations sans the voice of the researched and the researcher. Sociologists, educators, scientists, psychologists, practitioners, and researchers, whether positivist or constructivist, have all

discovered the value of employing narrative in their research studies.

The qualitative research approach of narrative inquiry allows the compounding of science and art. Assessments, clinical studies, criminal reports, and other data are combined with the phenomenon and literal heart of the matter as only the story teller can tell. The narrative inquiry methodology provides the means to understanding the lived experience of some African

American men and their successful journey to desistance from crime.

So much has been written about the reasons former prisoners return to prison, including inability to find stable and life-sustaining employment, absence of family support, homelessness, lack of medical care, drug addiction, and the absence of treatment. Not much, however, is available regarding the personal decision to desist from criminal behavior and how desistance is achieved in spite of the challenges and barriers to reentry and reintegration. Where are their stories of overcoming, achieving, sustaining, and succeeding? Was there an awakening—an epiphany? Was there a point in time that can be defined, pinpointed, recalled? Change happens

within a person. I propose that changing from criminal behavior to desistance from crime and recidivism is a phenomenon that is best explained and understood by the stories narrated by the ones living the experience (Bentz & Shapiro, 1998; van Manen, 1990).

Narrative is a means of characterizing the phenomena of human experiences, and the form implies that something happened to particular subjects in a particular life world (Bentz & Shapiro, 1998). Narrative discourse describes the lives and conditions of humanity in a way that numbers alone cannot capture. The narrative approach helps tell the stories of people, societies, relationships, and interactions and “mediates between an inner world of thought-feeling and an outer world of observable actions and states of affairs” (Bruner, 2002). Social justice, advocacy, and participatory worldviews are often best conveyed through narrative techniques primarily because this form of expression is more useful in understanding complex issues, and seeking solutions and relief for the disenfranchised, marginalized and oppressed including the ex- offender population central to my dissertation question and study.

Lieblich,Tuval-Mashiach, & Zilber (1998) present a formal definition of narrative research:

Narrative research, according to our definition, refers to any study that uses or analyzes narrative materials. The data can be collected as a story (a life story provided in an interview or a literary work) or in a different manner (field notes of an anthropologist who writes up his or her observations as a narrative or in personal letters). It can be the object of the research or a means for the study of another question. It may be used for comparison among groups, to learn about a social phenomenon or historical period, or to explore a personality. (pp. 2-3)

Qualitative research has its roots in anthropology and sociology, but it expanded into other disciplines as it became clear that the number-based outcomes of quantitative research left meanings, feelings, and thoughts out of the equation. For an expanded viewpoint, Polkinghorne opines that narrative data collected from descriptive information of occurrences by an

interviewee is not necessarily story—“It is qualitative research and their data is narrative, but it is not storied”(Polkinghorne as cited in Clandinin, 2007). Polkinghorne further describes his position regarding narrative inquiry by defining its distinction from qualitative research:

I think in qualitative research there is a general push to provide taxonomies and

conceptual systems and so on which sort of look for commonalities across interviews and other things. And my own point there is, I think that narrative is quite different, that it really deals with individual live. (Polkinghome as cited in Clandinin, 2007, p. 632) He makes the point that narrative inquiry is beyond the paradigm of qualitative research. It’s not just about people and recapitulation of things that happen but narrative inquiry “describes

changes through time experienced as it gets sedimented and affects other things” (p. 632). Most significantly, narrative inquiry invites the reader into a story; the goal of narrative inquiry is not to isolate, reduce, or simplify but to elaborate complexities and relationships in the service of understanding human life. Narrative inquiry is hermeneutic in nature because it is contingent upon the perception and interpretation of the researcher. The writer/researcher selects aspects of a narrative to highlight elements of a research context in order to portray a holistic picture of research participants, issues, and settings (Kenny, 2005, p. 41).

Consistent with the place of hermeneutics stated by Kenny (2005), Bentz and Shapiro (1998) discuss sixteen turns in which they engaged in the writing of Mindful Inquiry, and among the turns they advise on the place of the researcher in the interpretation of words and text that they describe as Hermeneutic Turns (J Through L):

J. Look at the elements of your texts as texts. Elucidate the levels of preexisting interpretations of the situations and their relevance.

K. Allow the movements of understanding happen on their own time.

L. Through presence and intention, allow for a release of new meaning to occur. Make a space, a clearing, for new “beings” to emerge (p. 51)

Given the opinions of the importance of interpretation and meaningfulness of story, the role of the researcher in the narrative inquiry process is critical to interpretation and

understanding of the narrated story. The relationship between researcher and research is one built upon, not only one of trust, but also one in which the researcher has become immersed in

knowledge about the subject of inquiry. It also brings into question the evaluation of narrative inquiry.

In its emerging state and varied uses and definitions, is there a standard or common guideline by which narrative inquiry is evaluated and accepted as legitimate research? Lieblich et al. (1998) offers one set of criteria by which narrative inquiry may be evaluated:

 width: the comprehensiveness of evidence,

 coherence: the way different parts of the interpretation create a complete and meaningful picture,

 insightfulness: the sense of innovation or originality in the presentation of the story and its analysis, and

 parsimony: the ability to provide an analysis based on a small number of concepts and elegance or aesthetic appeal.

Mishler (1990) offers a more simplistic evaluative process with only two criteria: trustworthiness and authenticity. He believes that rather than relying on formal rules and

standardized procedures of evaluation, narrative inquiry research is validated by a community of researchers who evaluate the trustworthiness of a study through discourse, measuring it against their own work. Authenticity, according to Mishler, is evaluated similarly by community discourse with an outcome of common thinking and validation of a particular study.

The form of narrative inquiry has continued to evolve and expand into other fields of study, e.g., psychology, anthropology, law, sociology, education, gender studies, art therapies, and life sciences in general. Yet, narrative inquiry has not attained the recognition and

acceptance by academia as scientific work. In an interview conducted by Clandinin (2007), Lieblich et al. (1998) explains that the separation of clinical psychology—the humanistic, whole person approach to studying human behaviorfrom mainstream psychology positioned clinical psychology as, perhaps, case study or stories, but not scientific work. In academia, the positivist world view remains the standard by which validity and value of research is measured and

qualitative research methodologies, such as narrative inquiry, although gaining acceptance by its use, still has not attained an equal place of acceptance.

The attribute of narrative inquiry methodology favorable to my research practice is the ability to seek out the why and the how by examining unstructured information, such as

interview transcripts, recordings, notes, and photographs. The fact that the methodology does not rely solely on statistics or numbers, which are the usual constructs of the domain of quantitative researchers, gives me literary freedom to write and interpret with the blurred distinction of hermeneutics inherent in the personal voice of lived experiences. Employing narrative inquiry and the associated interviewing techniques, I asked participants for the stories of change from the perspective of the reformed offender. The voice, the tone, the body language, the silence in between the words all are integral to the story telling, and I sensed keenly during the interviews and the story telling that it is from these places the stories emerged (van Manen, 1990). From the eyes, ears, and heart of my writer/researcher/activist position, I observed the storytellers and their characteristics. I listened, recorded and interpreted the stories of the men in the study who

There is not common agreement on the definition of narrative inquiry, even among researchers who assert themselves as narrative inquirers, except to agree that it is a qualitative methodology. Even so, proponents and researchers who ascribe to narrative inquiry as a valid and valued humanistic form of research accept it as essential to giving context and deeper understanding of real life experiences in a manner in which the positivist, objective methodologies cannot possibly do.

Historical Roots and Theoretical Premises

Television programs like Oprah Winfrey’s Soul Sundays and the Life Course series, public television biographies, and documentaries have made life stories and narrations of historical events popular and readily accessible to a wide audience all around the world, but story telling is not new. “Narrative inquiry may be the oldest type of research. Stories were the way people shared information, compared aspects of their lives, and engaged in debates long before written texts were even imagined” (Kenny, 2005).

We need not go too far back in history to see the existence of storytelling and the

influence of stories in the structure of lives and ways of being for entire populations and cultures. Tribal groups in Africa perpetuated and immortalized their traditions and cultural values through stories of their histories spoken through the voices of tribal elders and/or the designated and honored story teller of the tribe. Those stories embedded in the minds of captured Africans transported to the Americas as slaves were handed down through generations of ancestry. In 2007 on a trip to Senegal, West Africa, I was honored to sit with elders of a Fulani village who are the knowledge keepers of the tribes, and, thus, the story tellers of their history. In the United States African American storytellers adapt stories from descendants in many narrative forms,

including folktales, theatre arts, Negro spiritual, gospel, and contemporary songs. The same is true of other tribal groups, such as American Indians and Aborigines.

Going back two millennia, we find some of the first of literary narrative in our written history. Plato, a philosopher born in 427 B.C. produced the Dialogues, a compilation of stories. He founded the Academy in Athens, Greece, the first institution of higher learning in the

Western world. The philosopher Aristotle, a student of Plato, committed to written form most of the narratives for which he became known. Among them was his first elaborated theory of narrative written in Poetics.

The contemporary use of narrative as an academic method is integral to the emergence of anthropology as a formal discipline. Franz Boas, the founder of modern anthropology,

introduced rigorous scientific methodology that was patterned after research in the natural sciences. Later, other scholars, like Bronislaw Malinowski, Ruth Benedict, and Hamilton Cushing, pioneered cultural anthropology in the mid-20th century. They produced field notes from their observations of tribal societies that described settings, events, surroundings, and persons, thereby creating narratives that told the stories of the lives of the observed, including observation from their own perspectives. Malinowski was the first anthropologist to live within the culture he studied. From its beginnings in anthropological studies, the use of narrative inquiry spread into other fields and forms of research, including ethnography, sociology,

psychology, and other social and natural science disciplines. It is clear that narrative inquiry has found a place in the world view of phenomenological research.

Methodology

African American Men Who Give Voice to the Personal Transition from Criminality to Desistance (Voices) utilized narrative inquiry research to interview and record the spoken

accounts of ex-offenders who were recruited through the snowballing method, i.e., participants recruiting other volunteer participants via word of mouth interest. Participants told their stories of criminal behaviors, overcoming social and economic barriers, and finally breaking the cycle of recidivism after multiple jail and prison terms. From their voices comes the story of

changethe point at which each decided to turn away from criminal behavior to a life of desistence and freedom that had not been experienced, for some, for many years.

Narrative inquiry research involving storytelling and in-person interviews with ex-

offenders is limited. Criminology has a long research history, particularly in quantitative studies; however, qualitatively studies have a much shorter history, and their scientific significance is still debated in academia. As phenomenological research narrative inquiry is an emerging research methodology. There appears to be a dearth in the narrative inquiry literature that specifically focuses on African American men and their trajectories away from criminality to desistance. My research study adds to the limited body of research, addressing, exclusively, the African American men who, because of racial discrimination and social determinants different from any other group, warrant studies directed towards understanding criminality within and by individuals in this specific group that happens to be arrested, sentenced, and incarcerated at rates higher than any other group. Continuing interest in desistance research, social justice advocacy for change in the corrections systems, and the active involvement of ex-offenders in change for themselves and misguided young men will, undoubtedly, lead to additional research and projects.

It is commonly accepted by theorists and practitioners who study criminology and/or work with offenders that eventually most prisoners will be released (Bushway et al., 2001; Foster, 2001; Peterisilia, 2004; Hipp et al., 2010; Thompson, 2008; Travis, 2000) and return to the communities where they lived before incarceration. The difficulties faced by released

prisoners in their attempts to reenter and reintegrate into mainstream society are many, including limited access to housing, difficulty in finding employment and obtaining health services, food, and family support. Each one of these challenges to reentry have been researched extensively, particularly over the past 20 years or more, as increasing prison populations signaled the inevitable public crises of thousands of prisoners returning home.

I located qualitative research in which interviews of ex-offenders revealed similar

problems as those ex-offenders in my study, but the participants are not African American men, an important characteristic addressed in my research project. Some research focuses primarily on female offenders’ reentry and desistance efforts (Leverentz, 2010, 2011) or does not specify the race, gender, or ethnicity of the research participants. Race specificity is important because according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (Carson & Sabol, 2011) African American men comprise a disproportionately large population in prisons (35%), and they are arrested at higher and more frequent rates than other group. The disproportionate rate of incarceration means that there is also a large number of released prisoners returning to urban communities that are underprepared to provide the resources that the released individuals need to sustain themselves and avoid rearrests and recidivism.

The dissertation Recidivism and the investigation of prisoners who have successfully reentered American society (Larkin, 2002) studied and documented successful reentry. The study is qualitative research, but it does not include stories and the participants are not identified